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Does anybody know why Oracle has never changed the name of the file containing its JDBC drivers from classes12.zip to something more modern (like a Jar file)? The generated documentation at the Oracle Web site is also like 1996-era JavaDoc. I’m curious as to whether there’s a good reason everything from Oracle appears to be outdated or whether they just don’t bother to update things. My best guess is that they fear breaking systems that list classes12.zip by name, but that seems like a stretch. ...

OSAF is filling out its staff nicely. You already know that Mitch Kapor and Andy Hertzfeld were on the job. Now they’ve signed on Mitchell Baker (from the Mozilla project) and David McCusker as well. Perhaps my quest for the ultimate email client will finally be complete when Chandler is released.

If you want to see the Leonid meteor shower at its best in your lifetime, stay up late (or get up early) and check them out tonight. I’ve been putting off making an effort to see the meteors for years, and now it looks like it’s make or break this time. I hope I have the self discipline to get up and see them.

Did you ever wonder why Keith Olbermann left ESPN? He issues an apology and an explanation in his Salon column today. I’m glad he had somewhere to publish it.

I’ve mentioned here any number of times that at heart, Amazon has always been a software company. Last week, the company hired a former computer science professor as its chief algorithm officer (link spotted at Medley).

Of all the arguments in The Threatening Storm, Kenneth Pollack’s book arguing in favor of invading Iraq with a massive force, the most convincing one is that the so-called “Afghan Approach” advocated by many in the pro-war camp as a way to get rid of Saddam on the cheap is doomed to failure. I just read an article in the New York Times that helps expain why. It quotes a Kurdish leader from Northern Iraq saying that Kurdish forces intend to march on Baghdad if the US invades. If the US sends in a small force and lots of air support and relies on rebels to help us finish off Saddam’s regime, then those forces get to carve up the country when Saddam is out of power (that is, if they succeed, which is probably unlikely). If we leave Iraq to the Shiites, Sunni, and Kurds to carve up or fight over, then we’re going to be left with a big gaping black hole of infighting and crap in the middle of the Persian Gulf region that also happens to control a pretty good sized chunk of the world’s oil. There’s little doubt that countries like Iran, Syria, and Turkey would use the situation to their advantage to take what they want from the morass that Iraq becomes as well. If we’re going to go to war with Iraq (it seems inevitable at this point), then we ought to send in a massive force that can get the thing over as rapidly as possible (thus inflicting less casualties than we would in a protracted fight and guaranteeing stability once the fighting stops). If we leave it to the Iraqis to take out Saddam, the worst case scenario is that they lose (again, just like they have every single time they’ve tried to unseat him). At that point, Saddam goes on yet another killing spree against the rebel forces and their supporters, which means a whole crapload of killings and deprivation. Saddam has already used chemical weapons against the Kurds in the past, killing them en masse, and he had his army destroy plenty of Shiite villages after putting down the insurgency that followed the Persial Gulf war. Furthermore, the Shiites have suffered more under the sanctions than any other group, because Saddam has no real interest in feeding them. If we’re going to fight this war, then let’s go in as strong as we can, and put an end to Saddam’s regime as quickly as possible. I remain puzzled that the most ardent supporters of the war are often in favor of a half assed approach. ...

Have you heard about the new advertisements that will parody the government ads linking drug use to financing international terrorism by linking driving an SUV to the same thing? I think it’s kind of a shame that they’re targetting SUV owners in particular, because it weakens the message of the ads. I think that it’s important for Americans to learn things like the fact that the Saudi Arabians have spent literally millions of dollars over the past few decades to destroy all schools of Islamic scholarship other than the Wahabbi school, and that some percentage of the money we pour into Saudi Arabia’s economy is used to finance terrorism. Instead, what we get is yet another big laugh at the expense of SUV drivers. Is the objective here to educate people about how things really work, or is it to get a good belly laugh at the expense of those troglodyte suburban SUV drivers? Those are the people these messages most need to reach, and who Democrats desperately need votes from in 2004. Picking on them and causing them to circle the wagons and vote for the Republicans isn’t really helping anybody, is it? ...

Here’s something you won’t read too often at rc3.org: Congress fixed something. They passed legislation that improves upon the stupid fees that the Copyright Office imposed on webcasters earlier this year. It’s assumed that President Bush will sign the bill.

So there’s been an ongoing discussion among Java bloggers over which IDE rules, IDEA or Eclipse. I became so curious that I downloaded Eclipse and used it as my development environment for about a week, then I installed IDEA 3.0 and have been using it for the past couple of days. I love Eclipse – it’s got awesome CVS integration and it’s an absolutely beautiful application. Indeed, SWT (the GUI library developed as part of the Eclipse project) is incredible and Eclipse is the best looking Java application ever. It has a lot of other nice features as well. That said, IDEA is better. IDEA just has so many features that make your life a little bit easier as a programmer, and they all add up to it being an amazing product overall. I’d tried IDEA before, and I never got how cool it was, because I just opened it and started typing code. That’s not the way to go. If you want to know how good an IDE is, go and find the code that you have to work on every day that has the gnarliest classes you’ve ever written (or even better, that were written by the worst programmer that ever worked in your group). You know that guy who got laid off because all the code he wrote sucked? Go grab his code and load it up as an IDEA project. Then just start refactoring. The first thing you’ll notice is that IDEA is going to tell you a lot about what’s wrong with the code. The second thing is that it’s going to offer to fix many of the problems for you. Eclipse is good in this regard, but IDEA is great. I’m a hardcore bash/ant/Emacs/JDEE user. Or, I was. I have to say that both Eclipse and IDEA are better than my old environment (although there are still some Emacs tricks that really should be incorporated into these IDEs). IDEA, though, is the best. ...

Everyone who watched The West Wing on Wednesday got a lesson on why the Pentagon really does have to pay an absurd amount for many trivial seeming objects, but the truth is, of course, much more complex than that. The Project for Government Oversight has a chart listing some absurd prices that the government pays for various spare parts. And lest you think that this is just because the government has unusual requirements, the year to year increase on pricing for those parts is included as well. For example, how does a linear microcircuit that cost 11 cents in 1997 go for the handsome price of $5,788.76 in 1998? ...